Many expected Fire to get significant changes anyways given how much of a pain it is to balance and how overly dependent on crit it is. Trash tier at lower gear and god tier at higher (yes I know Fire isn't over the top on live but it got hit hard) isn't really healthy design.

That's true. Of all of the Mage specs...Fire is the one I expect to get the most attention in the next xpac. But with that being said, I just don't see them removing bombs. They're just a part of Mages, and have been for years. At least for fire with LB, the others a newer, however.

Could be just that they are making bombs fairly weak compared to actual nuking, which would mean a few nerfs and mastery change for arcane(again). You already won't multi-dot as Fire, because it does so little damage.

I guess the other reasons would be target limit for bombs, but that would mean all the bombs being the same, which would lead to them being spec based, which would mean new talent tier?

And my final guess is them changing rotations so we won't have time to multi-dot.

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Merged the bomb thread to this as it didn't make too much sense to have it up, when this got bumped up and is sort of dedicated for these things

Assuming we are keeping bombs (or at least fire keeping LB), I would be careful what you wish for. One of the ways they can restrict multi-dotting is with a cooldown (like shaman flame shock, or our own frost bomb), or another way would be like making our dot a finisher (like priest devouring plague). If it's the former, I have to say, I'm not in favor of that, not having one of your instant dots just feels kinda bad. If it's the latter, meaning as a DP-like finisher, that would mean a significant re-design of how mages work including using some kind of CP system.

Frost mages and Arcane mages already have psuedo-CP's, and blizz did say somewhere that arcane charges will be changing from a debuff to a buff in WoD, so I wouldn't be shocked if living bomb becomes fire's "finisher."

All I'm saying is be careful what you ask for, because while I think most of us aren't huge fans of being a multi-dot class (otherwise we'd have been spriests or locks or boomkin), the alternative might not be any better.

Edit: Uh, just to respond to myself... Living Bomb as a finisher might not be bad, per se. I actually kind of like devouring plague when I've played shadow priest. Just sort of a warning that they are still in pre-beta for WoD, and that getting hopes up for a complete revamp of mage dots might not be the most wise thing to do, because as we have seen, changes work out worse than we expect.

Well I liked playing arcane and being able to do good singel target damge and being able to multidot.... Though 2-3 emenie fights were best for fire/frost.... everyone has their good place right now....

I also think if bombs will be restricted to just a few targets they will feel too much the same... so blizz better compeltely reworks this tier... as well as t90 tier... as well as fire mage..... hm I sense a lot of new stuff coming ^^

I'm gonna miss Nether Tempest if they remove it or whatnot. Multidotting with it on many targets plus arcane explosion is amazing fun when farming mobs or doing things out in the world such as questing. Mage AoE and mob tagging ability will hopefully not be completely ruined with the incoming changes.

I'm with you on this critique. Nether tempest is probably my favorite spell in the game, not because "lol NT all teh mobs" but for the fact that the way it worked as a cleave was really unique. I thought the implementation of our bombs as talents was pretty good aside from frost bomb being so clunky, but I can understand why they would want to change them as there are just those situations where bomb damage got out of control.

Playing well with NT actually made playing the class interesting. Maximizing NT cleave as arcane (or frost) on some bosses was challenging and was still a different dot playstyle than spriests or warlocks who have multiple dots and different ways of applying them.

The big issue for me is mob tagging. There have been a lot of times when mages have been abnormally weak at tagging mobs because of a lack of decent instant casts without a cooldown - ice lance tagging of mobs is obviously garbage. Living bomb in ICC was nice but you had to be specced fire. I really don't see a reason why the bombs need to be removed, but the bombs being a necessity for high DPS on some fights might be something they could look at changing - perhaps removing the bomb component from some specs.

Well at this point we have no reason to believe that the bombs are being removed, just being changed. I know a lot of people are going to jump the gun and celebrate "yay new lvl 75 talents" based on this but I realy think they might just put a 1 target cap on bombs, make NT the 100% most single target damage and 2 target cleave, LB the best for 3-5 and frost the best for 5+ and this would make the bombs easier to balance for them and give each one more use.

I don't mind the bombs, I just don't agree all specs should be able to use any of them. I hope they make them weaker, but I am a fan of the idea to maintain a bomb as a priority (such as applying one on fire to boost your damage). Would be cool if like each NT tick would give you back 1.5% mana or something, stuff like that.